On September 2nd, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston imposed an adverse inference instruction against Oracle in its shareholder lawsuit because Oracle failed to preserve e-mail. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison failed to preserve e-mails and interview materials related to a book on Oracle. During discovery, Oracle produced only 15 e-mails from Ellison’s files, but produced over 1,600 Ellison e-mails from other employees – thus indicating that there were other e-mails in existence that were never produced. The book materials also were never produced because the book’s author disposed of a laptop containing the materials in 2006 or 2007. Since the destroyed evidence was relevant to the claim that Oracle knew about problems with its suite 11i, effects of the economy on Oracle’s business, and problems with Oracle’s forecasting model, the adverse inference instruction will tell the jury to infer that the missing e-mails and materials might show this knowledge.

The ruling may be found at http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/ellison.pdf